Baseball cards are very popular in the United States, particularly with younger baseball fans, and many of the same or other fans also collect similar cards involving other sports such as football, basketball and hockey. Such sports cards are typically flat, i.e., two dimensional, cards containing a photograph of a particular player together with identifying information on one side, and information such as the birth date, home town, team or teams played with and playing records of the player, on the other side.
As indicated above, while the invention is not limited to such an application, one aspect of the invention is concerned with providing a pop-up sports card, i.e., a card which, when deployed or erected, is three dimensional rather than flat and includes a portion which is raised up or erected from the base plane of the card. Pop-up items or devices are obviously not new per se and are, for example, often provided in children's books wherein opening of the book to a particular page and laying the book flat will cause a pop-up figure and/or scene described in the book to be erected and to thus stand up from the plane of the book. Further, patents relating to pop-up or cut-out display devices include the following: U.S. Pat. No. 3,090,144 (Malamudi); U.S. Pat. No. 4,062,138 (Warenback); U.S. Pat. No. 4,161,833 (Wagner); and U.S. Pat. No. 5,010,669 (Moran).